Emily Ward Bivens

Surface: The uppermost layer of something. This work imagines that we can undo the collateral damage of dissection.

Surface: To rise up from below. An act of hope, necessity, and vulnerability.

This video installation shows an animation that I created from my mother’s high school biology book. A frog is dissected and un-dissected giving the illusion that revelation can be undone. The dissection is shown in a small frame that once held a mirror. Under and above water recordings of frogs are removed one frequency layer at a time and then rebuilt. Projected tadpoles swim in matching small silver servers.

2020, video, wooden frame with translucent screens

A woman in a curiosity-filled sitting room gazes at far-off places through a Viewmaster. The piece is always remade for the place in which is it shown to feature original Viewmaster slides from the location. Location is recognized as here but the vintage esthetic acknowledges that it is not now. This work touches on the complicated relationship between time and place and the role of legacy.

This video features the artist Donna Moore.

2020, video projection

In Perpetual Motion, a woman in a crocheted straitjacket perpetually spins as she gazes lovingly and longingly at her dead pigeon. This piece highlights the confines of persistent grief for the seemingly banal.

This works features Rachel Sever Dallery.

2018, video, wooden mirror frames, translucent screens

In Pendulum, two projection screens made from antique dresser mirror frames face each other on the floor. The projected videos are of two women walking towards and away from each other down the same winding dirt trail continually offering the same dead chicken to each other. As the videos continue, the women become out of sync and no longer meet face to face on the road, but rather offer the chicken to the back of the adjacent woman or to an empty road.

This works features the Artist Donna Moore.

2017, projected video, taxidermy bucks from a thrift store, hair

A video of two women methodically grooming themselves is projected across from two taxidermy deer bucks. Over the duration of the exhibition, hair is added to the bucks until they are completely obscured. The title refers to the action and suggests the bucks are stand-ins for husbands. This video features Veronica Ludlow. The hair at her feet is her own hair that she has collected over many years.

2017, ceramics, sound, video, motorized turntable, taxidermy fox from a thrift store, synthetic hair, empty nest

In Nest/Den a taxidermy fox is hung high on a wall in a bed of hair. It overlooks two ceramic foxes with ceramic birds nesting in their hollowed bodies. There is an empty bird’s nest on the floor below. The ceramic foxes turn in opposite directions on hidden turntables allowing a moment of empathetic eye contact between the two foxes as they perpetually rotate. The soundtrack is of hyper slowed elevator muzak overlaid with finches and foxes calling to each other.    

2017, ceramics, sound, glass bell jar

Listen is ceramic collage created from slip-casted animals, clocks, and flowers from commercially produced plaster molds, some of which I found on the side of the road. The vanitas depicts cats consuming each other’s faces, flowers bisecting the bodies of birds, and birds escaping out of the neck of a fox as birds peck holes in the fox’s ears. While seemingly about death, the piece releases a cacophony of the sounds of the animals depicted when the bell jar is lifted.

2017, video, monitor, telebinocular

Audience members look through the vision tester to view a video of a person holding a live pigeon to her chest. The video is split into two circular images; one toned red and one toned blue.  When you look through the Telebinocular you might see a single video with natural color.  If you are colorblind you see either a red or blue image.  The video lasts as long as it takes for the pigeon to stop struggling and fall asleep.  On one level this is a vision test and on another it tests your recognition of captivity, struggle and resignation. 

2017-2018, video

In this series of videos, women engage in the equally futile and loving labor of grooming the deceased. Each animal was painstakingly preserved yet expunged from its original collection. Here they are attended to but still no more alive than before.

These videos feature the artists Donna Moore, and Guen Montgomery. Attire was thrifted by Donna Moore and Guen Montgomery.

These videos have been projected in multiple installations. In Wait, the first two videos acted as moving portraits with confrontational stares on the wall in a domestic setting. In the Terrain Biennial, the images were projected on the windows from inside a house at nightfall for a month, giving the appearance that each night the woman in this house sat and cared for the unmoving animals. The Terrain Biennial is an international exhibition of site-specific art made for the front yards, balconies, and porches of homes that are both vacant and inhabited. This took place in the Enos Park neighborhood in Springfield, IL. For the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN, the videos were screened behind musicians from the festival in a 3-hour block of a slow-paced improvised soundscape. The hypnotic music matched the repetitive action of grooming the animals.

2018, video, a vanity suitcase with the monogram, “G.W.”, wigs, dentures, records, record player, mask of George Washington partially eaten by insects, lace from women’s underwear for use as a cravat, panty hose, coats, gloves

Rules of Civility is a performative interactive artist lecture based on three readings of the Rules of Civility, the 110 guiding principles that George Washington uses to become presidential. Each rule averages between 140 and 280 characters. The rules can be read as an introspective desire for self-improvement or as a way to affirm implicit bias by continually asserting a hierarchical narrative that excludes people based on class, race, and gender, or as a critique on the current attitudes towards political civility and presidential conduct.

The lecture is set to muzak records produced by Jackie Gleason, which purport to help you transform yourself or others into the cultural ideals illustrated on the covers. Audience members select a number from a vision test that corresponds to one of the rules. They are then able to choose how they wish to transform using the props provided as we discuss possible interpretations and consequences of the rules and the difficulties of aspiring and critiquing simultaneously.

2017, modified bed frame, hair, feathers, stop motion animation, video

 A woman continually tries to pet a hawk. The hawk becomes agitated when her hand approaches but it does not fly away. Perhaps the hawk is lured in by the false promise of the mink stole.

This video features Guen Montgomery. The hawk was hit by a car on my road.

2017, my grandmother’s plate with woodcock decal and a projection of a stop motion animated dead woodcock that I was given on the same week I was given the plate

Projections of stop motion animated woodcocks perpetually taunt the decal of a woodcock on a plate into coming alive.

2016-2017, modified tube radio cabinet, surveillance cameras, electronics, projectors, video, stop motion animation

The audience is invited to press the original radio buttons to change the video that is being rear projected onto a screen below a nest.  They can see one of six videos; A stop-motion animation of a wren caught in a hair nest, a live video feed of their head taken from the chandelier above, a stop-motion of a cardinal caught in a hair nest, a prerecorded video of someone standing in the space behind where the viewer is standing or various live video feed of the opposite side of the space and the people in it.

 photo credit for first two images: Brytton Bjorngaard

Wait is a collaborative narrative between Donna Moore and myself. Collections of domestic and natural artifacts and each artist’s own art work are combined each year for a month in the late summer to create a new work. If one’s collection is considered a form of self-portraiture, Donna and I found it significant, that we had strikingly similar collections.

2017

Year one is comprised of a long room built with finished white walls to match the existing gallery walls. Cabinets without backs and mesh openings allow for a view from the built room to the rest of the gallery space. Pine was collected to be used as both carpeting on the interior and insulation for the walls. The audience is welcome to open anything and discover what is inside. Mirrors throughout create a doubling and tripling of the audience, animals, and objects within. The animals and plants inside are dead and the domestic objects are non-functioning remnants of the past. The hall operates as a memorial by those unable to let go of the stories contained in the inanimate. Videos of two women engaged in animal husbandry of both live and dead animals are throughout. The outside wall facing the remainder of the gallery is only covered with chicken wire as if the plaster layer was never completed. This reveals hidden nests, bones, stolen objects, and other mysteries. The floor on the outside of the room is covered with uprooted cherry tomato plants. The audience is invited to harvest them as opening reception food. As the exhibition progresses the uneaten tomatoes begin to rot. Sarah Dixon was hired to play exaggeratedly slow dirges on the euphonium for the opening and instructed to be oblivious of the audience.

2018

Year two is comprised of a small room constructed in the center of the gallery. The wooden structure is walled with layers of pattern for making clothing. Initially the audience is not able to go in the room but can see that there is a piano and bathtub covered with vegetation. One woman plays the piano. Outside the room are rows of wooden theater seats on each side of the structure for the audience to sit and surmise what is happening on the other side of the paper-thin walls. The audience is later allowed to enter the room but it is an empty shell with dying vegetation. The audience is able to either play the piano or sit in the tub. In the entryway of the space sits a forest of night-blooming cereus plants, ready for their once-a-year night blooming. The audience is invited to sleep in the gallery, waiting for the bloom and subsequent closing of the flower. The dying flowers are left as the only remnants of the event.

2016

Et à travers la mer- collage, petticoat, gouache 

Marie Antoinette’s Syndrome- petticoat, gouache

These paintings are static studies for the floating bodies seen in my video pieces. This works contemplates the nature of historical portraiture if all but slight traces of material culture are removed.  The petticoats below function as a reintroduction of the material evidence, though mismatched in time and origin.

The Bridge Club*

2017, performance at The Nerve Performance Art Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL

In Blot, two women fruitlessly engage in non-verbal communication from either end of a tall, unstable ladder. The woman on the bottom must lay flat to allow her body to be projected on, thereby bringing into focus a projection of another woman. The woman on the ladder is both trying to view the projection and get to the top, where a tissue box emitting the sound of a fourth woman reading an instructor's manual from West Point awaits.  Rather than climbing down, the woman on the ladder blots her lipstick and drops the tissue to the woman below before reapplying and starting the cycle again.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens, and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance, and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations, and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes, and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations, and behaviors.

2015, object, live feed video, projection

 Crown is a two-part video installation.   A bird’s nest is fixed flat against the wall making it incapable of fulfilling its original protective purpose.  While a viewer investigates the nest, three cameras, discreetly fitted into the chandelier above, are filming them.  In another part of the gallery, the live feed video is projected from the ceiling onto the floor below.   The three projections show a bird’s eye view of an audience member in a moment when they might be contemplating the fates of the onetime inhabitants of the nest.  This starts a cycle of observation that can only be fulfilled when multiple audience members enter the space.

2014 - object and live feed video

This small case with the monogram L.E.G is mounted on the wall. Viewers open the case to reveal a live video of their own legs captured by a discrete surveillance camera embedded into the wall below.  They are unwittingly given a private reoriented view of their legs.

2014- objects and video projection

Two foot boards are suspended on the wall. From afar viewers can see a blue glow coming from the bed.  Each contains a projection of a single pair of feet on the opposite side of the bed from each other. If combined they might be lying together.  The viewer either must lean over the bed or use the hand mirror to see the video. Their bodies obstruct the projection, casting their shadows in the bed thereby both filling and voiding the image simultaneously.

2017, video and sound

This video was created by Guen Montgomery and Emily Bivens at the Edwards House in Springfield, IL. The sound was created by Guen Montgomery and Jessica Anderson. We were given unrestricted access to create a film in this historic site for an entire afternoon. We began by opening all of the closets and cabinets that are not open to the public. After finding this Hoover vacuum, we decided to spend the rest of the afternoon vacuuming.  

The top video is the upstairs of the house and the bottom is the downstairs. One of the rooms is home to the Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd courting couch, seen in the lower right corner of the image.

Semblance I- object, live feed video,  2014

 An audience member approaches the medicine cabinet and sink and sees whatever is on the other side of the wall.  A video camera is capturing the public space to be viewed in  place of a reflection in a private space.

 Semblance II - object, live feed video,  2015 

An audience member approaches the medicine cabinet and sink and sees whatever was in front of the mirror five minutes prior.  A discrete video camera is capturing and delaying the display.   This delay allows the viewer to see one of three things: the empty space, someone else or a past version of themselves.

The Bridge Club*

2015, performance and photographs, Art Palace in Houston, TX

Cut is a performance that corresponded with the opening of an exhibition featuring performance documentation by The Bridge Club. The performance references Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. Three women begin in what seems to be the act of cutting to hem a dress line. Through the performance the cuts become more drastic and less straight. The woman doing the cutting only makes eye contact with the other two women while making the cut. The woman being cut stares at an audience member. Each woman is complicit in the cutting of the others as are those who bear witness.   

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens, and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance, and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations, and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes, and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations, and behaviors.

The Bridge Club*

2013 – 2015, mobile installation and touring series of live performance works

The Trailer, a project of The Bridge Club collaborative, is an installation and series of live performance works centered around and inside of a vintage camping trailer. The Trailer operates, at different and overlapping times, as a mobile art installation offering “evidence” of routes traveled, people encountered, and places experienced along the way; as a set and prop for live performances by The Bridge Club; and as an “archiving unit,” in which we devise a variety of means of collecting visitors’ own histories, memories, and experiences to be incorporated into the larger project. Each live performance with The Trailer is an entirely new, distinct, site-specific work both planned according to its particular context and shaped unpredictably by the responses of its audience. In the silent performances with The Trailer we are in costume and have specific and limited interactions with the audience.  Conversely, in the archiving sessions we are ourselves and interact freely with the participants. We devise surveys and activities, such as collecting receipts outside a grocery store from memories of people passing by and creating physical maps of participants’ journeys to the place where they currently live.

This section includes images of The Trailer and various archiving events from around the U.S. Images of each performance/ installation/ exhibition with The Trailer is chronicled separately in the portfolio. A full-color catalogue documenting the first two years of The Trailer project is available.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens, and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance, and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations, and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes, and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations, and behaviors.

The Bridge Club*

2015, performance with The Trailer at Ohio University, Athens, OH

Dirty Little is a performance that responds to the act of exposing and covering up events on college campuses. Objects donated to The Trailer project by past participants go through an elaborate process of being listened to, cleaned, and hung to dry before being cut off of the line and allowed to break on the concrete below.

woman below before reapplying and starting the cycle again.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens, and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance, and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations, and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes, and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations, and behaviors.

The Bridge Club*

2014, performance with The Trailer for Prospect Biennial 3+, satellite venue programming presented by Press Street, New Orleans, LA

The Verge is about the futility of trying to save something that you are continuing to destroy. Set in New Orleans where the saltwater intrusion continues to jeopardize the coastal wetlands and increased intensity and frequency of hurricanes have devastated the city, this performance deals with complicity and complacency. In an area where so many, including members of my family, were relegated to living for an extended period of time in FEMA trailers, our ornately and impractically decorated trailer took on additional meaning. The trailer appears to have been washed in and haphazardly wedged in the bushes in front of the gallery.

This performance includes sandbags screen-printed with the pattern of lace antimacassars (a lace doily used to protect the back and arms of upholstered furniture). When split open, the sandbags are revealed to be filled with salt. One woman fills her tea cup with salt from a sandbag that she splits open with a decorative knife. She proceeds to spread the salt in mounds on the sidewalk. Another holds fresh water over her head until she can no longer. The water spills, only nominally washing away the trails of salt, after which the process starts again. A third woman stares trances-like at a young oak tree, seemingly unaware of the cyclical events unfolding. A fourth woman sits in the trailer, silently leaning forward with keen interest in anyone who enters the space.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens, and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance, and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations, and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes, and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations, and behaviors.

WARNING SIGNS

The Bridge Club*

2014, sequence of two performances with The Trailer, presented by Ulrich Museum of Art, and Wichita State University, Wichita, KS

In part I of Warning Signs four women wearing matching black formal dresses engaged in mark making and mark erasing while watching the sky for signs of danger. A woman with white gloves fit with sandpaper tips flips through an atlas erasing places and routes traveled. A woman holding a lace antimacassar covered chalk reel creates the same lines on the concrete while another erases them with spoons of water from a teacup. A woman blows silent air through a megaphone. Another uses a telescope to broadcast images of a storm on the side of the trailer. While both the acts of making and erasing the marks is futile, the work also forecasts the dangers of forgetting what has already been charted.  

In part II of Warning Signs four women wearing linen work suits continue to chart and erase with even more urgency while one of the women methodically and endlessly cracks eggs, examines and discards.

‘Warning Signs’ included performances and public interactions supported in part by an Artistic Innovations award from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations and behaviors.

The Bridge Club*

2014, installation and sequence of three performances with The Trailer  at New Genre Arts Festival XXI, Living Arts, Tulsa

Colony is a series of three performances over the duration of a performance festival. In Colony I, four women in dress uniforms examine maps made by hand and try to match them up with atlases stored in the trailer, after which another woman runs the maps through a sewing machine following the graphite lines. Another woman keeps a single flame going with a box of matches as the forth stares at dim projection of the landscape. In Colony II the women wear jumpsuits and venture out past the area surrounding the trailer, exploring. In Colony III, the women are pant-less as they sew the routes from the maps in the previous performance on each other’s pantyhose. One woman walks in and among the audience locking eyes with a single audience member until the audience member looks away. She is both on patrol and also claiming the space for the four women. A video of the landscape beyond the art center is now visible and the women and audience together watch the wind blow.

‘Colony’ included performances and public interactions supported in part by an Artistic Innovations award from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations and behaviors.

The Bridge Club*

2014, performance, commissioned by/presented at Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, CA

Plan features The Bridge Club collaborative engaged in processing a never-ending blueprint loop through a modified laundry wringer. One performer, wearing blinders as might be placed on a horse to keep it calm, sees only the plan. Two others alternately engage with ephemeral video scenes projected onto the walls and onto their own bodies via the fourth performer’s hat. This work references plan-making as an act of both hope and futility, while the physical document of the blueprint alludes to the ways that plans get derailed, remade or destroyed— physically, emotionally, psychologically or historically.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations and behaviors.

2015, video

The woman in the portrait sits as a blue bird builds it’s nest out of the clothes on the woman’s body. The woman becomes host to another’s idea of domesticity, requiring her to sit still as the world progresses behind her. In each location that the portrait is exhibited, a new background is filmed of whatever is on the outside of the building in which it is shown. The viewer recognizes this moment as both current in time and location while referential to the past.  

This video features Victoria Buck.

2013- dirt, clay wood, audio equipment, Pure Data at Temple Contemporary in Philadelphia, PA.

This was an experience offered  to anyone wanting to reenact moments of regret with a five-foot opossum in a state of apparent death. People could either go alone or with someone into this shrouded octagonal structure to speak into the ear of the opossum. The small mic fitted into the possum’s ear fed into a program that delayed the sound by five minutes.  It was then played through speakers away from the possum, near the entrance of the gallery.  An audience entering the gallery was only able to see the shadow and to hear the delayed voice.  The audience assumed the voice belonged to the shadow but it was more likely that the voice belonged to someone standing right next to them. This experience allowed an individual audience member to be both the deliverer and receiver of a difficult message.

The Bridge Club*

2013, live performance from The Trailer project at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, TX, as part of the Texas Biennial 

In Waltz Across Texas, four women are engaged in close listening of the silent. One woman seems to hear the music and dances carelessly to it until it ends and she takes a seat and waits for the next interlude. Objects that were collected by The Bridge Club throughout Texas are listened to and a short hand recording is made. These utilitarian and decorative objects are looked at closer by the audience because they are being listened to. This performance highlights the importance of being heard rather than just observed.

‘Waltz Across Texas’ included performances and public interactions in several Texas cities, supported in part by an Artistic Innovations award from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations and behaviors.

The Bridge Club *

2013, live performance from The Trailer project. Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX

In What Remains, the inaugural live performance with The Trailer project, The Bridge Club methodically handles a variety of animal figurines, presumably contributed to the project by audience members. Each figurine is treated with a visible level of care before being quickly and violently thwacked with a shovel. The remains of each figurine are then buried in the adjacent sculpture garden’s lawn. The women take no pleasure in this, but rather silently bury the past. They then take soil samples as if testing the ground for contamination.  

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations and behaviors.

The Bridge Club*

2013, solo exhibition with performance and installation at Box 13 ArtSpace, Houston, TX

Inheritance was an accumulative exhibition and live performance featuring the simple, domestic act of washing dinnerware. In its initial state, the installation featured the spare arrangement of fragile, unfired porcelain dinnerware, awaiting activation through use. Midway through the exhibition, the performance activated and transformed these objects, and by the exhibit’s close, the installation consisted merely of residues. The work’s title, Inheritance, refers to the physical and emotional belongings, expectations and legacies that are passed down between generations.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations and behaviors.

The Bridge Club*

2012, digital image sequence for the Billboard Art Project on a Roadside LED billboard on Peachtree Road, Atlanta, GA

Throughout September and October, a sequential series of digital images created by The Bridge Club for the Billboard Art Project was displayed on a roadside LED billboard above a gas station parking lot in Atlanta, GA. This work, with text pulled from vintage advertising campaigns, explored the intersections of art, commerce, theatricality and presentation. Also included in Color Shift, an exhibit for the Billboard Art Project curated by Katerina Lanfranco.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations and behaviors.

The Bridge Club*

2012, live performance, commissioned by Flux Projects for Flux Night event, Castleberry Hill Arts District, Atlanta, GA

Loose Snare was a three hour live performance in Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill neighborhood for Flux Night, during which The Bridge Club moved throughout a gathered crowd of over 12,000 event attendees. Each performer carried a ladder and a Victorian-style ‘ear trumpet,’ used to visually communicate a physical effort to hear something ephemeral over the din of the crowd. Audio broadcast from each performer’s body prompted viewers to also listen. The four performers repeatedly disbanded and converged, at times aligning strangers or fracturing existing groups within the audience. This work investigated the nature of both shared and isolated experience within a crowd.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations and behaviors.

The Bridge Club*

2012, live performance & installation at the Art Palace Gallery, Houston, TX
2013, Re-performed for Currents International New Media Festival, Santa Fe, NM

Medium featured the four performers of The Bridge Club seated on chairs suspended from the gallery walls at a height just above viewers’ heads. From their respective seats, each performer interacted with or responded to a combination of objects, video projection, reflected light and sound. The work’s title refers both to the collection and dissemination of other-worldly messages and to the materials from which artworks are created. This work invokes the intentional, wondrous and quasi-religious aspects of both art making and seeking the divine.

*The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative, which I co-founded in 2004, consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus, an abandoned storefront, and a laundromat in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space. Each work is conceived in specific relation to its site and audience.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations and behaviors.

2010- mixed media

Expecting Helen is comprised of five life-sized alligators created in an exterior courtyard and one life-sized alligator created inside the museum. Each alligator is fitted with two surveillance camera eyes. Footage from all twelve cameras is projected behind the alligator in the museum. The audience first encounters the exterior courtyard alligators not realizing, until they see the interior footage, that the alligators are recording and projecting their movements. While the audience is able to see themselves in the real time footage from the interior alligator, they can only imagine what was captured when they were outside and who was watching based on the current footage. Over the course of the exhibition, the alligators first grow wheatgrass then slowly start to breakdown and fall apart.